Lois Katherine Field, part 2

We learned quite a bit about Lois's early life yesterday. We can fill in some other gaps by visiting www.findagrave.com

I have mentioned FindAGrave in an earlier post. Over 132 million gravestone records are available in their database. Many of these records have been indexed by volunteers; other volunteers have taken pictures of gravestones, and family members often edit the record to show related graves.

Let's start out with Lois's grave, which I entered into FindAGrave when it was a fairly new website.

I enter what I know about Lois. You don't need a lot of information, although if your ancestor has a common name you will want some filtering information, such as death year and state:

Look what I find:

Clicking on this link, I see a lot about her. This site was created by Donald Miller, a volunteer who loves family history. The family links and pictures were most likely added by Jan Shoemaker, one of my mother's cousins. The baby in the top picture is Steven Olson.

Notice that the birthdate for Otis Field is wrong on this page. Otis and Orson were identical twins. According to Lois, one nice fall day the kids were all outside playing while their mother was embroidering on the front porch. The kids were sliding down the cellar door when Orson fell off. He went to bed with a stomach ache and died three days later. He probably had some kind of internal bleeding, but the family was very poor and far from a hospital.

Clicking on the other links on this page will bring you to pictures and stories about the other people in Lois's family, including a picture of her father's grave.

So, she was born Lois Field and died Lois Vetter. So, where does Carstens come in?

I tried searching for a marriage record in FamilySearch, and couldn't find one for Lois Field and a Carstens. I tried again using Ancestry. After trying some different searches, I found this:

 

Of course, this leads to questions that can never be answered. Who was Herman Carstens?  Mitchell, South Dakota is over 200 miles from Modale, Iowa. How did they meet? My mother said that Lois was divorced. The marriage couldn't have lasted long -- Lois and Karl were married in March of 1926, less than a year later. Because divorce records are not digitized in most states, it would be expensive to ask for these records just to satisfy my curiosity. 

I did find the obituary for Herman's second wife: http://www.mitchellrepublic.com/content/mildred-carstens-0, as well as Herman's grave: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=114369446&ref=acom.

More about Lois tomorrow....